V_V comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Douglas_Reay 09 September 2012 04:41AM

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Comment author: V_V 10 September 2012 09:40:33PM *  2 points [-]

In the good old tradition of making up armchair evolutionary psychology "explanations" (aka just so stories), here is my uneducated guess:

In the ancestral environment, abnormal behavior patterns (unusual body language or lack of proper feedback to body language, unusual vocalizations, poor motor coordination, anything "odd" in general) were symptoms of neurological disorders. Neurological disorders were typically caused by infectious diseases, because, well, infectious diseases were so common back then that pretty much any disorder was probably caused by them.

So, there is this odd-behaving ape. The apes that are not bothered by that and keep hanging around it or, gods forbid, mate with it, catch meningitis or some other nasty bug and die. The apes who are creeped the hell out of it avoid infection and get to pass their genes.

Fast forward a couple million years, to some odd-behaving dude. Chances are that he has no infectious disease. Maybe an autism spectrum condition, or poor socialization or socialization in a different culture, or whatnot. But your ape amygdalae don't know that. They just say to your cortex "odd behavior = mortal threat".

Perhaps you rationalize this visceral fear as justified adversion to risk of assault, but it may be actually an innate response evolved for something completely unrelated.

Comment author: Unnamed 11 September 2012 09:17:21PM 3 points [-]

Then why is creepiness so gendered?

Comment author: V_V 12 September 2012 12:04:31AM *  -2 points [-]

Is there any evidence that creepiness is so gendered? It could be just a stereotype.

Even if it is indeed gendered:

  • Modern causes of creepiness (autistic spectrum condition, etc.) may be gender biased.

  • Males are less risk adverse than females, expecially when it comes to mating, therefore they might be less sensitive to creepiness.

Comment author: Unnamed 12 September 2012 02:31:28AM 7 points [-]

There is anecdotal evidence that creepiness is gendered, and all of the evidence on creepiness that I know of is anecdotal. The examples trend heavily towards women finding men creepy, rather than any of the other 3 gender combinations. The examples also tend to involve sexual interest (or suspected sexual interest) from the person who is perceived as creepy, even in cases which involve other gender combinations. These seem like important clues that can help us narrow down the hypothesis space, rather than modern-day rationalizations of an unrelated feeling.

Standard evolutionary psychology does include a disease-avoidance mechanism, much like the one you described, which is based on the emotion of disgust. One hypothesis is that creepiness is nothing more than an instance of that, but the patterns of behavior that people describe when they discuss creepiness seem much more closely related to sex than to disease. For example, if creepiness was evidence of an infectious neurological disorder then we'd expect everyone to want to keep their distance from someone who has shown signs of creepiness. But instead, anecdata suggest that avoidance motivations are extremely strong for the creeped-on person, weaker for other people of the same sex as the creeped-on person, and weaker still for people of the opposite sex.

Comment author: V_V 12 September 2012 10:18:51AM *  1 point [-]

There is anecdotal evidence that creepiness is gendered, and all of the evidence on creepiness that I know of is anecdotal.

Anecdotal evidence might be affected by a gender-biased sample:

The communities where creepiness is common enough to be a salient issue are "geek" gatherings. People who attend comics conventions, LW meetups, etc., are mostly male. Therefore, even if the average female geek had the same probability of being a creep as the average male geek, you would know much more male geek creeps than female ones due to this base rate bias.

if creepiness was evidence of an infectious neurological disorder then we'd expect everyone to want to keep their distance from someone who has shown signs of creepiness. But instead, anecdata suggest that avoidance motivations are extremely strong for the creeped-on person, weaker for other people of the same sex as the creeped-on person, and weaker still for people of the opposite sex.

Sexual intercourse is a primary avenue of disease transmission, hence it would be plausible that the creepiness emotion is more salient in people who perceive the sexual interest of an uncanny person.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 12 September 2012 01:42:38AM 4 points [-]

How sure are we that creepiness is strongly correlated with autism?

Comment author: V_V 12 September 2012 09:50:23AM *  3 points [-]

We aren't. It was my conjecture based on the fact that autistic people may have difficulties at reading and using facial expressions and body language, show unusual speech patterns (choice of topics, discourse structure, syntax, lexicon, intonation, etc.), poor motor coordination, etc. Thus, I hypothesize that they are more likely to elicit the uncanny valley effect.